Link Love (2013-10-19)

Thought-provoking

“But, it’s impossible to be human, live in our culture, and not be biased. All you can do is be aware and considerate as a result. Implicit biases are those we’d like to hide, especially from ourselves. Understanding them is central to understanding how early we acquire them and how pervasive discriminatory lessons are.” How Biased Are You? – Role / Reboot

“Metalearning is important, because it’s easy to delude yourself into believing you know more than you actually do. In this great article by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, he explains why many students think they’ve studied well—and then later bomb the exam. The difference, he says, is that students confuse familiarity with recollection.” The Importance of Knowing What You Know – Scott H Young

Religion

“But, after I had that ring on my finger and I was in the middle of planning a wedding, and after all our families were on board and we’d announced it to everyone we knew… that was when the abuse began in earnest. It was abuse he kept carefully concealed from anyone– abuse I was promised I was protected from, because, after all, we were courting. We’d done everything exactly how we were supposed to.
And I was trapped.
Because I’d been told to guard my heart, that once I give my heart away, I won’t have my whole heart to give to my husband.
Because I’d been taught that it was my duty, my responsibility, to make sure our relationship was perfectly chaste. He knew that– he sexually assaulted me, he raped me, and he used what I’d been taught against me. I was a cup full of spit. I was a half-eaten candybar. I was that rose with all the petals torn off. No one would want me, I wasn’t good enough for any other man.”

Equality

“Because of you, dear tweeters, I – like many other feminists of color – have been forced to defend a brown woman’s right to win a competition whose premise turns my stomach. (Talent contests! Hair spray! Your answer to world peace in two minutes or less!) Because the truth is, your insight-less cyber-comments reveal much about the reality of living, as brown women, in post-9/11 America.” #Intersectionality for Racists: On Miss America – The Feminist Wire

“The mockery of his mental illness bothers me. Not because of Hugo, but because I firmly believe that if the stigma of mental illness is to be challenged, it’s time to stop dismissing claims of mental illness as “faking it.” This includes everyone, people that we respect, people that we do not respect, people that we like, people that we do not like. Mental illness is not any excuse for his past, current, or future behavior, but that doesn’t make it any less true.” Deconstructing Hugo: Revisited – Persephone Magazine

“Society is deeply binarist. To the majority, there are only two genders. That majority has an amazing need to constantly be reading people’s gender all of the time, and an amazing confidence in the judgment calls they make. So there are two gender readings I’m going to get – male or female. When I get the male reading, that should supposedly privilege me over the times I get the female reading. Here’s that totally contradictory thing: It doesn’t. A female reading will grant me access to relative safety and decent treatment from strangers. If it can be sustained over a period of time, it will grant me access to non-queer spaces with relative ease, and to employment or anything else (as much as any women ever have those things). A male reading, meanwhile, threatens my safety and decent treatment; access to non-queer spaces, employment and so on.” On the Male Privilege That I Totally Have – Alien She